


Bad Dreams

by draculard



Series: Comfortween [11]
Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy Trilogy - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Nightmares, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:54:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26944759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: On her 5-week mission with Thrawn, Che'ri learns that adults have nightmares, too.
Relationships: Che'ri & Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo
Series: Comfortween [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946224
Comments: 5
Kudos: 64
Collections: Comfortween 2020





	Bad Dreams

Che'ri's constant dreams about getting lost abated a little during her five-week mission with Thrawn, but they didn’t go away entirely. Learning how to pilot a ship without using the Sight certainly helped ease them, and some nights she slept straight through to morning without dreams of any note. 

But then there were nights like this, where she woke up gasping for air and already half in tears. Che’ri sat up slowly, wiping her eyes on the heel of her palm, the details of the nightmare — swirling starlines, a lurch upward as gravity fell away, the crunch of metal impacting on metal — already starting to cool inside her mind and fade away. By the time she caught her breath, she couldn’t remember anything but the vague feelings of distress that were always left over after a bad dream.

She tossed her legs over the side of her bunk and sat up with a sigh. Outside her cabin, she could see a dim light coming from the kitchenette.

If there was one thing to comfort her, it was that Thrawn never slept all the way through the night _ever_. She walked through to the kitchenette on bare feet and found him sitting up at the table, for once not dressed in his uniform. He was wearing loose-fitting athletic gear that probably doubled as his pajamas, and his hair was sticking up in the back.

He glanced up from his questis as she came in and gave her a fatigued-looking nod. 

“Che’ri,” he said. “Bad dreams?”

Che’ri hesitated, glancing at his questis screen. When she saw he was only playing a number puzzle, not looking over any important reports, she relaxed a little and approached the table to take a seat opposite him. He'd taken her chair apart with a spanner early in their trip and adjusted it so her feet could touch the ground when she was sitting in it. “Yeah,” she said.

Thrawn nodded, turning his questis off. “Would you like some spiceleaf tea?” he asked her, already standing. “I’m making some myself.”

“Yes, please,” Che’ri said, her heart rate spiking with excitement that she was careful to conceal. Her last few momishes had only let her drink spiceleaf on holidays, with one of them claiming it was bad for her and another claiming children simply weren’t allowed to drink it by government decree, and she’d get in trouble if the captain found out. Both were lying to her, one less obviously than the other; she knew from holofilms, which were always showing kids who drank spiceleaf when they were upset.

Thrawn turned his back to her for a moment, preparing two mugs at the counter. She watched him move around the kitchenette with lazy grace, his eyes always half-closed, as if he might fall asleep any moment. While the water boiled, he turned to face her, leaning against the counter and crossing his arms loosely over his stomach in a gesture that struck Che'ri with a sadness she couldn't explain.

“Do you have bad dreams often?” he asked her quietly. Che’ri hesitated, searching his face for any sign that he was judging her. She found nothing.

“Sometimes,” she said. She ran her fingers over the tabletop in a mindless pattern, drawing vague shapes on the surface to avoid Thrawn's eyes. “Not as much as I used to.” Then, gathering her courage, “What about you?”

Thrawn blinked at her, but his expression didn’t change. 

“You’re always awake in the middle of the night,” Che’ri said awkwardly. She sneaked a look at his face, but he didn't seem mad — or at least, not mad enough to yell at her. It was hard to read his expressions sometimes. “Do you just stay up really late?" she asked. "Or do you have bad dreams, too?”

Thrawn tilted his head to the side, like he was thinking it over. Before he could answer, an alarm started beeping and he turned away from Che'ri at once to busy himself pouring boiling water into both of their mugs. His movements were measured and lazy, showing no signs of irritation (much to Che'ri's relief). She watched in silence as he counted down the seconds until the tea was ready and then strained out the leaves.

Bringing both mugs back to the table, Thrawn placed one in front of Che’ri and said, “It’s a mixture of both. Everyone has bad dreams, you know.”

“Especially soldiers,” said Che’ri grimly, and for some reason, that earned her a small, involuntary smile from Thrawn.

“I suppose,” he said. “Don’t drink that just yet. It’s still hot.”

She eyed the mug before her, privately certain that a burnt tongue would be worth the risk. The warm scent of spiceleaf was wafting toward her through the air, smelling just as tantalizing as the holofilms always claimed and making it almost impossible to resist. She closed her eyes and tried to work through the mouth-watering effect.

To distract herself, she looked up at Thrawn and said, “So tonight ... was it a bad dream that kept you up?”

“Yes,” he said simply. When he didn’t go on, Che’ri wasn’t sure what to say, and silence stretched between them for a moment. She wasn't even sure what she'd say to a fellow sky-walker in this situation, much less an adult like Thrawn. When she started making patterns on the table again, she saw him shift position out of the corner of her eye, resting his chin tiredly on his hand.

“Do you want to talk about yours?” Thrawn asked her, his eyes so heavily-lidded that she worried he might fall asleep right there. “Sometimes that helps.”

“I can’t remember mine anymore,” said Che’ri honestly. She straightened up in her chair. “But you can tell me about yours, if you want.”

Thrawn blinked at her, seeming caught off-guard. 

“If you remember it,” Che’ri added.

“That ... may not be a good idea,” said Thrawn haltingly. He didn’t say it in the firm, ‘what I actually mean is no’ way that most adults used; it seemed to Che’ri like he was actually probing her to see if she could handle it, giving her the chance to back out. Puffing her chest up, she said,

“You don’t have to worry about me. I watch all kinds of scary holos and they never give me nightmares.”

Thrawn gave her a thoughtful look, not entirely disbelieving.

“What was it?” asked Che’ri, desperate to convince him she could handle it. She leaned forward on her seat and mimicked posture she'd seen from Thalias that always seemed very official and professional to her — even if technically her elbows were on the table, and her other momishes had always disapproved of stuff like that. Looking Thrawn right in the eye, she said crisply, “Were you in battle? Did someone die?”

He gave a soft sigh that might have been a laugh; with his hand still on his cheek, she couldn't see his lips well enough to tell if he was smiling. “Nothing like that,” he said. "Nothing so graphic."

When he didn’t go on, Che’ri shifted in her seat and cupped her hands around her mug of spiceleaf. “Well, what was it, then?” she asked, losing some of her drive.

He hesitated, his eyes scanning her face. Finally, looking down to stir his spiceleaf tea, he gave a minute shrug. A line appeared between his eyebrows, but his posture didn't change. “I dreamt I had siblings," he said eventually. "A brother and a sister.”

Che’ri frowned, waiting for him to go on, to explain what made this scenario a nightmare. It didn’t seem so bad to her, having siblings. She wouldn’t mind it, she supposed, though she certainly didn’t mind being on her own, either, and she knew plenty of sky-walkers who would complain about siblings if they had them. It just didn’t seem like the sort of thing a grown-up would call a bad dream.

She was about to ask more questions when Thrawn looked up, not meeting her eyes for more than a second before he glanced away.

“They were trapped on an ice shelf on my home world, Rentor,” he told her. “Have you been to Rentor? Or studied it?”

Che’ri shook her head.

“It’s an oceanic world,” Thrawn said. He sipped his tea, and Che’ri mimicked him, though it was a little too hot for her. Seeming to realize this, Thrawn gently touched the rim of her cup and guided it back down to the tabletop. “The settlements are built atop icebergs, and many children play along the edges without supervision, climbing the shelves,” he continued. “I dreamt that my brother and sister were trapped on one. That it had disconnected from the iceberg and was floating away, into the ocean.”

Che’ri watched him, trying to read his face. He was watching the steam play over her tea with hooded eyes and deep lines etched beneath them. After a moment, he reached out and brushed his fingertips against her cup to check the temperature, then pushed it toward her with a nod. 

“So what happened?” Che’ri asked after she’d taken a sip. “Did you save them?”

Thrawn’s face twitched, his lips settling into a thin line. “No,” he said, his voice coming out rough. “I made an attempt. But the oceans of Rentor are too cold to swim through. The longer I swam for them, the weaker I became, until…”

He finished with a listless shrug and a vague gesture, then reached for his own mug of tea. For a long while, neither of them spoke. He seemed to regret speaking; most likely, he thought he'd scared her, that the imaginary scenario was too much for her, that he should have never even implied the ending. Che’ri could imagine it just fine without Thrawn spelling it out. She could see the ice shelf floating farther and farther out to sea with his siblings on top of it and out of reach, and Thrawn’s head sinking under the water as he drowned. 

She adjusted her hands around the mug, suddenly feeling cold. She waited for the spiceleaf to warm her up a little, but the heat seemed to circle around her palms and stay there, not extending to her fingers.

“Thrawn?” Che’ri asked.

He raised his eyes to meet hers and gave an absent nod of acknowledgment, still holding his mug close to his lips and letting the steam warm his face. He was doing the same thing she was, Che’ri realized. Trying to warm himself up.

“Do you _really_ have siblings?” she asked when he didn't answer her. “Or was it just in the dream?”

He stared at her, his eyes tired and unreadable. He held the mug so that it covered his mouth, giving Che’ri no way to interpret his expression. He looked as still as a statue to her now; she couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

After a long moment, Thrawn finally took a quiet breath and seemed like he might answer her; he put his mug down and scooted closer to the table in his chair.

“Finish your tea,” he said softly. 


End file.
